We spent the day going back to some of places we saw on the walking tour for a closer look. We got a ticket that let us go visit six attractions including the St James church (the one with the arm hanging at the door), Jewish synagogues (where we saw children’s drawings from the war) and the Jewish cemetery, which had more than 80,000 graves from the war. While we were having a beer breaks (beer is pretty cheap here, like NZ$3.50 average for a bottle or 0.5l glass) we saw a car being towed away for parking illegally. The police took photos of the car, called the tow company then it hoisted up the WHOLE car and whipped it onto the truck, all within like 15 minutes! We saw the guy come back to his BMW go absolutely nuts, Czech style haha. Afterwards we made our way to the Famous John Lenon wall, a massive wall with lots of graffiti, comments and a little shrine to of course John Lenon, I wish I had bought a paint pen to mark my territory! Later on we went to a Chinese restaurant for some pretty average sweet and sour pork. By the way that haven’t made it illegal to smoke in bars and restaurants so it’s pretty weird! I prefer smokefree restaurants!
Yesterday we went to Petrin Hill to find a church that has weird architecture and looks sort of like a Thai temple – but we couldn’t find it! When we came back to the hotel we found out it was actually a wee hike from the hill. Anyway while we were there we saw some communist statues and went up the observation tower, a tower that the Eiffel Tower was based on but 1/4 the size. It was 299 stairs to get to the top! It was worth it once we got up there though. Afterwards we fluffed around the town and came back to our hotel early as we needed nana naps before a night on the town. We managed to finish a bottle of duty free and then went to some bars in town. There was a really cool bar called Bombays and met a young French girl who had a filthy rich and old Japanese boyfriend – that kind of tells you how the recession is hitting some people! We ended up at a 5 story night club and the top floor was kind of like boogie nights. We needed to stay up until 4am because that’s what time the metro opens. Well about 3.40 am we went on a KFC hunt and it was CLOSED! After wandering around and not finding ANY fast food we went to the metro station and it looked anything but open, I think it was supposed to actually open at 5 am. We yes we were pretty much stranded because we didn’t want to catch a taxi. Taxis are REALLY DODGY here and only locals catch them because they apparently take you to quiet places and met up with other people to beat you up and take your money, or worse! After realizing we had no other options we got a taxi with a reasonable negotiation price and ended up at our hotel safe, but golly gosh it was the SCARIEST THING I’VE EVER DONE IN MY LIFE. For those who have seen Hostel, all the drivers are like the mafia-looking guys from that. Did I mention whenever we see groups of children we call them the candy gang – THANKS A LOT HOSTEL!!!! :S